Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Last week I was listening to Slate’s Political Gabfest, a weekly roundup of particularly crucial, as you no doubt surmised, political topics, which often still feels a day behind given our current every-single-second American insanity, but nevertheless. One of their topics was the North Korean Summit, and one of their sub-topics of the North Korean Summit was the so-called movie trailer that President Trump’s team crafted to show Kim Jong-un a possible “new world” and how “the doors of opportunity” are ready to be opened if North Korea denuclearizes. The film stank fairly heavily of Gavin Volure’s Sunstream ads – “INNOVATION – TOMORROW – AMERICA” – as so comically chronicled in a memorable episode of “30 Rock” but then, as many analysts argued, Trump’s video was a perfect exhilarant for the likes of NK’s Supreme Leader. John Dickerson, co-host of Slate’s Political Gabfest, agreed with that line of thinking on the grounds that Kim Jong-un is an avid consumer of American culture, a certain kind of American culture, a “Big Jerry Bruckheimer consumer”, in his words. Stop the tape.

A Jerry Bruckheimer-esque trailer concocted to sell North Korea a glittering future? What if, and I’m just speculating here, leaders of others nations did the same thing to Trump? What sort of movie trailers would they show him as a means to imagine the “new world” promised by MAGA? Boy did that get us to thinking.

Potential Movie Trailer Genres for T*ump's America

Sci-Fi. I know a lot of people would argue we are living through the early stages of dystopia, but you can’t show dystopia to Trump. You can’t show him the overcrowded cityscapes of “Blade Runner”. No, you would have to show him something like the Fhloston Paradise Luxury Space Liner of “The Fifth Element”, because I imagine an America set entirely on a cruise ship would be right up Trump’s alley. Then again, maybe all you would have to pitch him is a “Demolition Man”-ish future where Taco Bell is the sole restaurant choice. That is totally Trumpian; that is totally, totally Trumpian.

Sports Movie. Sports movie are inspirational, underdog stories, and Presidents who deal solely in winners and losers do not tend to see the world through an underdog prism. An underdog suggests you were once a loser, or that your overall air is loser-y enough to make one think you are up not to snuff. President Trump is always up to snuff, even if he, say, loses the popular vote, which is why he has no sense of humor about anything and why if he stepped on a rake would explain, with rake scars across his face, that he “meant to do that, okay, it was intentional, very, very intentional”, and then send his Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda out there to both confirm the act’s intentionality and refer everyone to “the White House Groundskeeper for any further questions about the intentional incident.” That’s why a nation might show President Trump a highly edited trailer of “Kicking & Screaming” betraying only the parts where Will Ferrell’s mild-mannered suburban dad as an authoritarian commander of a youth soccer team bellowing “Losers!” through an orange traffic cone at innocent adolescents correlates directly to winning.

Buddy Movie. Things move fast in Trump’s America, and whereas once the Supreme Leader and Mr. Brexit were headed for some sort of “King Kong vs Godzilla” situation – “Rocket Man vs the Dotard” – we have instead wound up in Buddy Movie territory. Who knew?! The archives show us that one of President Trump’s favorite movies – “Bloodsport” – is a Jean-Claude Van Damme joint. And we all know that Kim Jong-un is buddy-buddy with The Worm, Dennis Rodman, who remains, forever and always, my favorite American professional athlete so don’t you dare tell me that I can’t see Both Sides. Thus, a specially touched up “Double Team” trailer could metaphorically propose a future where Trump and Kim Jong-un exist as a kind of FDR & Churchill, just with more awkwardly staged comedy. Trump: “Offense wins the glory.” Kim: “But defense wins the game.”

Innocent Man on the Run. Imagine Harrison Ford’s immortal barking “I didn’t kill my wife!” being reframed as “There was no collusion!” Of course, our President does not really do much running. He has a finite amount of energy, after all, and it cannot be wasted on things such as desperate scurrying. Therefore we might have to scrap the “on the run” part of the pitch. It might just be “Innocent Man”, an Innocent Man movie about an Innocent Man who is very, very innocent and waits for his Innocence to be confirmed rather than runing around and thinking fast to prove it. Much of the movie involves the President watching cable news waiting for/expecting to hear this confirmation.

Pygmalion. John Barron (Donald Trump) is the big man on campus at his Barron International Golf Club Cocoa Beach. But his Barron Colosseum Hotel & Casino has gone under. Although bitter over the closure, John consoles himself by claiming that the Barron Colosseum is replaceable by any other property. John’s friend, Jimmy (James Woods), disagrees and challenges him to a bet on whether John can turn any random property into The Eighth Wonder of the World within 18 months. Jimmy picks out America, a federal republic composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions, as his choice for John who is then forced to run for President. Dystopian hijinks ensue!